Baruch Kimmerling

Baruch Kimmerling, who has died aged 67, was probably the first Israeli academic to analyse Zionism in settler- immigrant, colonialist terms. He described his homeland as being "built on the ruins of another society". A devoted atheist, he lamented Jews' and Arabs' failure to "separate religion from nationality".

Though associated with the "new historians" who question the official narrative of Israel's creation, Kimmerling was a sociologist by training. In his book, The Interrupted System: Israeli Civilians in War and Routine Times (1985), he began anatomising what he saw as the deleterious, if disguised, militarisation of Israeli civil society. Challenging the notion of Israel as a beneficent "melting pot", he called on fellow citizens to embrace their multiple origins - Arab and Jewish, oriental and western, religious and secular.

In 1993, he co-wrote (with Joel Migdal) what Library Journal in the US called "the best descriptive treatment of the Palestinians to appear in decades". The book, Palestinians: The Making of a People, noted how Israel's victory in the six-day war of 1967 paradoxically reunited and politically revived Palestinians, and returned the Middle East conflict to its pre-1948 inter-communal cockpit.

The book's publication coincided with the apparently successful Oslo peace accords. Ten years later, with the peace process in ruins, Kimmerling released his controversial Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War against the Palestinians. What began as a biography became an analysis of "a gradual but systematic attempt to cause Palestinians' annihilation as an independent social, political and economic entity".

To his adversaries Kimmerling was a tendentious polemicist who let ideological bias overrule academic sobriety and gave succour to Israel's foes. Yet he called himself a patriot, and while decrying the "monstrous practices of Zionism" he valued Israel's "islands of marvellous humanism and creativity". He feared that a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine dilemma would just cause further Balkanisation and bloodshed in the Middle East, and he opposed boycotts of Israeli universities.

Kimmerling lectured for nearly 40 years at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also held a chair at Toronto University, and compiled textbooks for Israel's Open University. All his life he suffered the effects of childhood cerebral palsy. He was repeatedly hospitalised, had extreme difficulty speaking and spent his last three decades in a wheelchair. Despite his ailments, he enjoyed attending conferences and mentoring students. He wrote nine books, hundreds of essays and numerous newspaper articles.

Kimmerling was born in the Transylvanian border town of Turda, Romania. In 1944, Nazi pressure raised the spectre of Jewish deportation. In an unpublished autobiography, Marginal in the Centre, he recalls how German aircraft strafed his family as they fled Turda on a Gypsy wagon. When war ended, the Kimmerlings returned to discover their property gone. Theirs was a bilingual household; his travelling salesman father spoke Romanian, his more literary mother, Hungarian. Realising his talent, they hired a private tutor. In January 1952 the family left for Israel.

After growing up in Netanya, Kimmerling entered the Hebrew University in 1963, taking his PhD 10 years later. In 1983 he expanded his doctoral findings to produce Zionism and Territory, now regarded, even by critics, as a seminal reformulation of Israeli sociology that places "the conflict" centre-stage. This work was followed by Zionism and Economy (1983), The Israeli State and Society: Boundaries and Frontiers (1989) and Palestinians (1993).

Kimmerling became ever more prolific as his illness worsened. His purview moved from institutional analysis to more cultural critiques, like The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society and the Military (2001). Two years later, he updated Palestinians as The Palestinian People: a History, to incorporate the effect of the Oslo agreement and the dilemmas facing Israel's Arab citizens.

Kimmerling tracked social upheavals without pandering to the voguish. Invariably, he leavened scholarly prose with mordant humour. Hence his essay on independence day, wryly titled My Holiday, Their Tragedy. In Utopia Here and Now: The End of the Ashkenazi Hegemony (2001), he described subgroups fracturing and reshaping national identity. One such group are north African Jewish immigrants. Kimmerling's wife, Diana Aidan, whom he married in 1975, was born in Libya and grew up in Italy. She survives him, as do his three children.

· Baruch Kimmerling, sociologist and political critic, born October 16 1939; died May 20 2007